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Category: Process

To be honest, this assignment was very tough for me as I feel that the assignment’s requirement is pretty vague and can be interpreted in many ways, making it hard for me to grasp. Thankfully, the group consultation last week offered some useful insight as to the direction my project should take.

Due to the project reducing to 4 images instead of 6, I am now able to better focus my energy to make the 4 better. The 4 characteristics that I have chosen are Sleepy, Curious, Wary, and Careful.

I will be dedicating and basing this project to 3 cats close to me (from left to right): Nachos, Tom, and Mars. Nachos is the community cat in my hall, while Tom and Mars are my pets that has sadly passed away (RIP buddy).

Another reference I will be using will be the mobile game Neko Atsume and a diagram of cat’s mood.

Here is the draft that I did last week in Krita.

Using the draft as a guide, I started all over again with the same background image.

To get a polaroid-esque effect, I look to Pixlr Desktopsoftware to do my editing. This software is essentially the desktop version of the Pixlr photography smartphone app. It enables beautiful looking effects quickly and easily. Another advantage is that it does not lower the image’s dimension that would otherwise reduce the image’s quality.

After finish editing the background photo, I started sketching the cats into the image file.

With the first image, I went for a warm color scheme base on the idea of a lazy afternoon since the character is about sleepy and the idea of being able to sleep anywhere.

I decided to play around with the idea of placement, after being suggested from the consultation last week. It seems to work out just fine.

I know I mentioned I will not use Photoshop for this assignment, but I only realized Krita’s animation feature is still under beta and thus I am not able to use this feature to create the 3 to 4 frames animated gif as part of my final submission (digitally). So after considering the options, I decided to break a small rule and use Photoshop only for animating the image (and compiling them into PDF for printing).

Here is how the final version will look like! 😀

A little sneak preview of all the 4 images I have done. All that is left to do is to animate them and print them! 😀